Another Guantanamo Bay?

(published on July 2009)

C Shivakumar and Shiba Prasad Sahu

Chennai:

It looked like another Guantanamo Bay as inmates, some mentally ill, some disabled with one hand and one leg, are losing hope disillusioned by their long incarceration in Chengalpattu refugee camp.

Nearly 86 of them are locked in a small campus which has 32 cells without basic amneties. “We live in the 25 cells. Other seven cells are used for other things, including making food and other things.”

“Most of the inmates are sick. There is also a mentally ill patient. The authorities aren’t providing him with any healthcare,” rues an inmate, who doesn’t want to be named.

As most of them squat outside demanding their immediate release, many confide they have lost hope and faith of ever meeting their families, who are ekeing out a living working as labourers in open refugee camps.

Some share their experiences and many bitter. Among those is soft-spoken Sivakaran who shows the photograph of his family and then shares his trauma.

Sivakaran fled war-ravaged Sri Lanka to eke out a living to support his family in January 2007. His family was based in Jaffna. “I didn’t have anything to support them so I escaped to India to find a decent job,” he says. But miseries did not end in India. He was picked up by the police on suspicion and was sent to the refugee camp.

His family which was dependent on the sole breadwinner then shifted to Mulaitivu during the war. It was on March 26 he lost contact with his family. Then came the tragic news. His wife Shymala (32), children --Swarnan, 12, Tulasi, 10, Puvithajini, 5-- all perished in Sri Lankan air raid.

“I am not able to accept their death. I can’t share my grief. Life has been hell for me. I am suffering from TB. It is more than two-and-a-half years I am arrested but the case is being postponed. If there is no solution to this, I will end my life in jail,” he says.

Sivakaran is not the lone one to undergo the tragedy, many have lost their near and dear ones. And they have themselves to console as their link to the outside world is cut off.

Most of the inmates have been shifted from Puzhal, madurai, Trichy, Palayamkotai and other parts of Tamil Nadu to the camp.

“Now the war has ended, why are we detained for so long,” says Vishwa (name changed), who nearly lost the hope of ever seeing his mother and his two brothers who are spending their days in abject penury in an open camp in Tamil Nadu.

“I went to visit the temple in Rameswaram when I was picked up by the cops. I am the eldest in the family. I don’t know how the family is making their ends meet,” says the 21-year-old, who has spent nearly three years in the jail.